The trailer can be found here.
Jeez I'm hyped. I'm really curious about what exclusive features Splatoon and Zelda will have over the Wii U. The new Mario title looks so colorful and bright, I can't help but be reminded of those Unreal Engine demos.

Like already said it looks like a Wii U 2.0, making the tablet a portable component. I really love the concept of taking a whole gaming system with you and being able connect it with other units and docking stations alike.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fres

I'm probably the only person who will still call it the NX even after release

I got this down with a stupid programmer joke:
There is a switch but no case .-.

In all seriousness, I liked the portable aspect of the Wii U, so being able to completely disconnect sounds super welcome to me. Otherwise I'm waiting to see what software they're announcing for the thing because that's what I really care about when it comes to Nintendo.

I REALLY am excited for the NS! It looks so freaking sleek, and the different types of controller support the console has thus far will make this thing REALLY fun at parties. Though, my only question is how many people will actually use the system OUTSIDE when it comes out? Did Nintendo do something right when trying to advertise to that specific audience?

Hm. I would have preferred an iOS peripheral, publish the games up on the App Store, and be done with it.

That would have narrowed their market far too much, on top of giving up the profit margin on hardware sales and the static hardware platform that console developers expect. The gamers within that market are used to buying games for extremely cheap - most of them would be turned off by the prices Nintendo asks for, especially when they'd be showing up side by side with free to play games in the app store. A kid trying to convince his mom or dad to pay 60 dollars to buy them the latest Mario would have to contend with them pointing out that Angry Birds right over there is free, they've played it themselves and know it's fun, why not play that instead?

Never mind the customer service nightmare that would come with people buying it to use it on incompatible models, or getting a subpar experience due to using a lower-end one, or even just one with apps running in the background, or even just stuff breaking because Apple put in an update that a game - it could be Nintendo's or a 3rd party's - that it doesn't like.

Then comes the stuff that tanks the entire business model - Nintendo no longer gets to make money licensing access to its platform or proprietary cartridges because someone will just make a knockoff peripheral (hi madcatz!) that works with everything if Nintendo tries to do any kind of lockout, and it has to share its profits with Apple (including for in-app purchases), and it has to go through Apple's app approval process as does third parties, and it no longer gets to be the gatekeeper for games using Nintendo's peripheral in the first place.

And on price... hoo boy, the price. The cheapest model of iPad you can buy is the WiFi 32G model iPad Mini 2 at $269, but that certainly isn't powerful enough to power games to carry the torch from the WiiU. The next one up is the 32GB iPad mini 4 wifi model, at a whopping $399 - that's already $50 more expensive than a launch WiiU Deluxe! Added with the price of Nintendo's peripheral (we'll assume that you get a digital pack-in game for buying it) you're now in the same bracket as the anemic launch XBox One, and approaching the disastrous price range of the launch PS3, all while narrowing the profit margin of the hardware, and removing the ability to do any kind of significant price cuts in response to flogging demand because Apple controls the price.

Of course, piracy would also be a concern - with no control over the platform, Nintendo would not only have essentially no ability to defend against jailbreaking the device, there's already a significant number of jailbroken devices already out there. They'd almost immediately be in a situation equivalent to the R4 proliferation in Europe that killed DS development.

And then on top of it all, Nintendo would be alienating a significant portion of their fanbase - not a small whiny portion, either. When software sales are more important than hardware, the kind of brand weakening that would come with subordinating themselves to Apple's platform would be severely detrimental all on its own.

Nintendo basically has zero reasons to do something like that... and I'm rather thankful they didn't because I sure don't want to shell out $500 to get my fix, lol.

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Science tells us that nothing can be proven, only rendered more likely to be true. If we do not question what we already know, how can we know, much less admit, when we're wrong? Such things are vital to progress.

Being an old fogey, I'm not dragging around more hardware with me. Apple's ecosystem is also pretty monolithic, so I don't think fragmentation is a big deal.

But wouldn't you be carrying more hardware around if it was a...

Nobody's forcing you to go everywhere with it. Seems like the idea is that it'd be good for road trips and other long non-home moments of substantial boredom where you have nothing else to do, if you really need a reason to want this
this